Bush Is Revising Energy Policy to Address Global Warming

By JOSEPH KAHN

Published: June 10, 2001

WASHINGTON, June 9—
Barely three weeks after the White House issued President Bush's new energy blueprint, some top officials are backing away from its projections of how much coal, oil and gas the United States will burn in the years ahead.

At the same time, they are preparing to announce new steps to address global warming, accepting the scientific evidence that warming is occurring because of human activities, including the burning of fossil fuels. The steps include spending programs meant to reduce energy consumption or increase the use of clean energy sources like wind and solar power.

Administration officials said the energy strategy, a 170-page document prepared over three months by a task force led by Vice President Dick Cheney, was a ''statement of reality'' rather than a vision of the nation's energy future. They said some of its most striking projections were intended to call people's attention to energy needs but not to predict how administration policies would ultimately affect energy production and use.

The recasting of the energy policy is a response to criticism that it did not take into account the problem of global warming, a topic that European nations are expected to raise on the president's trip there next week. European leaders expressed alarm in March when Mr. Bush abandoned the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty intended to curtail global warming.

Mr. Bush plans to make a statement on Monday that reiterates his rejection of the Kyoto Protocol as ''fatally flawed in fundamental ways,'' but promises to work within the framework of United Nations environmental negotiations to come up with ''an effective and science based response,'' according to a summary of his statement that the White House circulated on Capitol Hill today. A copy was provided by the National Environmental Trust, an advocacy group that favors the Kyoto agreement.

Mr. Bush will order cabinet agencies to develop ''creative ways'' of addressing the problem, ''drawing on the power of markets and technology,'' the summary said.

I. Lewis Libby, Mr. Cheney's chief of staff, told environmentalists this week that the administration had miscommunicated some elements of the plan, said several people who attended a White House meeting to discuss the environment.

Mr. Libby noted that the administration had relied on ''business as usual'' projections from the Energy Information Administration, part of the Department of Energy, to describe a critical energy shortfall. An example is Mr. Cheney's often repeated estimate that the nation will need at least 1,300 new power plants by 2020. But the Bush team did not intend to suggest that it agreed with the same agency's business-as-usual estimates of how all those new power plants would affect concentrations of the so-called greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

''Those numbers are sober projections,'' an administration official said. ''They are bad numbers that make people realize that we have to do something. It's a statement of reality, not a projection of where we would like to take things.''

This appears to be a significant shift. When they unveiled their energy strategy in May, Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and other administration officials did not describe its projections in that way.

A cabinet-level committee is still developing a global-warming strategy. But Mr. Bush's statement on Monday will reiterate that there are still some uncertainties in the science of climate projections, that developing countries must participate more fully in reducing emissions and that any plan must ensure continuing economic growth -- all signs of the administration's ambivalence.

Mr. Bush is expected to eventually propose new money for research and development of global warming-related technologies, going beyond the roughly $10 billion in projected spending outlined in the energy plan. He will also call for more research into global warming itself.

Some administration experts have also experimented with projections of future energy production and use to see how they would affect climate change. These include a potential doubling of nuclear power's share of electricity production, since those power plants emit no greenhouse gases, and a much greater emphasis on renewable energy, like wind and solar power.

The Energy Information Administration projects that without policy changes, emissions of carbon dioxide, the main heat-trapping pollutant, will increase by about 35 percent by 2020. Though the statistics on energy production underlying that projection are scattered throughout the Bush team's energy report, the estimate of greenhouse gas emissions is not mentioned.

The report focused mainly on increasing domestic supplies of energy to meet demand at moderate prices. It embraced the use of coal-fired power plants, which emit large amounts of carbon dioxide. It supported the use of renewable energy sources but used the Energy Information Administration's estimates to conclude that they would at best account for a tiny proportion of energy output in 2020.

Critics argue that the strategy should have aggressively promoted new energy sources and conservation programs.

Administration officials said that although they relied mainly on the information agency's numbers, they had always intended to find ways of reducing greenhouse gas emissions beyond what that agency projects.

They said that some recommendations in the energy report -- tax credits for fuel-efficient vehicles and a push for more nuclear power, for example -- would reduce the use of fossil fuels below the projections of the energy agency.